6 Underground Fallacy
I'm proposing a fallacy that probably already exists and has a far less obscure name. Just it's 2026 and I have been a long time reflecting on the enormously destructive hot air that entered our atmosphere in the past 10 years.
I named it for a line, a single line of lyrical content in trip-hop act Sneaker Pimps' single "6 Underground" that possibly isn't even styled that way:
"Don't think 'cause I understand, I care."
Though the delivery set to the music makes this sublime lyric much easier to parse in terms of emphasis and importance, here's my attempt to put that into written word:
"Don't think'-cause-I understaaaand .... I caaaaaare."
Now, the informal fallacy, such as it is, is going to wind up being twofold, because with a little rearranging of the lyrics, we can completely lose the meter of the backing track but get:
"Don't think because I don't care, I don't understand."
So the first fold has a warning of fallacious inference Because A do not conclude B.
And the second fold works backwards as a warning to not infer because not B, do not dismiss A.
First fold
So a vegan is walking along the street and they see someone sitting at a cafe drinking tea and eating a crumpet.
"Sir! Sir!" they say with some urgency. The man eating the crumpet quickly chews and swallows his last bite.
"Can I help you young...?" The man says.
"I notice you have honey on your crumpet, are you aware that honey is made by bees?"
"...yessssssss?"
"A single bee produces less than a teaspoon of honey in its entire life, it's an animal product, insect exploitation!"
"Yeah, so..."
"So multiple bees worked themselves to death to produce the honey on that crumpet."
"I said 'so' sir."
"Whaaaaaa..."
My example is cartoonish, and I want to say on the record that vegans can be both rad and super tedious. The only thing all vegans all have in common is that they try to avoid eating beef.
In the first fold of this fallacy, one actor assumes that the dissemination of information will lead to some behavioural change, possibly some moral chafing.
Instead, the very information they have found compelling enough to put at the centre of their identity, they discover has little to no impact on a stranger. Like, the stranger...doesn't...really...care.
And lest I paint myself as someone who is like "fuck the bees" because in writing this scenario, I at least am aware of the commonly held belief that a bee produces miniscule amounts of honey from their lifetime industry, my brain apportions my concern to think in terms of things like the worker bees conscious capacity for suffering, and wonders about other things like "how long does a worker bee live?" (google says 5-7 weeks).
Overwhelmingly, though I probably share the majority intuition - cruelty to social mammal species - I care a lot, cruelty to reptiles that routinely eat each other's young - I care a little, cruelty to insects - don't pull wings off flies and shit, but otherwise I don't give a fuck, cruelty to microbes - I'm not sure cruelty to microbes is even possible.
In the past 10 years, which strictly speaking would be from 2016 which probably is when it went loco bananas but may go back to 2014 or sooner, the 6 underground fallacy such that I assert it exists has grown in potential utility, though because I'm only asserting it now in 2026 that utility may already be on the decline.
To go all "realtalk" which was probably last a popular expression in 2014, a social phenomena emerged in the following behaviour - somebody wrote a something, an op-ed that was basically a meme and it would share a recent and wholly plausible and even shocking finding from a recent legitimate study like "60% of women by age 15 have experienced sexual harassment" this could be shared on then-popular social media like facebook, now presumably everyone 1) understands, then perhaps online, or offline someone might have an exchange like the following:
- Q: (innocent) "How old is your sister?"
- A: (non-innocent) "Old enough."
At which a participant or bystander to the exchange might attempt to enforce 2) care.
"Don't joke about that. There's a 60% chance your sister has been sexually harassed by now!" or something.
Now, carefully, I don't want to bismirch the non-innocent responder in suggesting that they do not care about the issue of sexual harassment of in particular, minors. It is however likely, that they care less than the person who calls them out.
The 6 underground fallacy holds, because information and knowledge simply does not oblige someone to care. There is possibly a larger fallacy at play that suggests people optimise for morality, in some form of "begging the question" which for clarity, as a fallacy means you forcibly insert your conclusion into the premises of your argument.
- Premise: To care about something is not to make jokes about it.
- Premise: "A" made jokes about something.
- Conclusion: "A" does not care about it.
Premise 1 is worthy of rejection. Clearly people make jokes about things they care about all the time. But this example has already also demonstrated the second-fold and so is a good segue.
Second Fold
"tohm, tohm!" I turn around. "I was just talking to Nathan, he is going to ask Chris out!"
"You think I like Chris?"
"No, Nathan is a man, Chris is a man. Nathan is inviting Chris to enable eachother's sin."
"Yeah, so?"
"Aren't you aware of what the book of Leviticus says?"
In this example, we get the second fold. The unnamed speaker, assumes that because I don't care that Nathan is into dudes and if Chris is too, and specifically this Nathan dude then there might be some dude-on-dude action, then I must not understand what a book purporting to contain the revealed design of the creator of the universe has to say on the matter.
In the previous section, under the "realtalk" example of the serious issue of sexual harassment of female presenting minors, I wrote the "call out" response as citing the 60% statistic. Which again, it's a reasonable inference that the speaker by citing the relevant statistic to emphasize the careitude has inferred that the joke-maker must not understand that female minors do get sexually harassed to better than-even odds otherwise they would not make such jokes.
I do not deny that heinous people exist, in particular misogynistic men and boys of a violent disposition and/or possessing of dark triad traits. At no point in my life did I reach the previous conclusion via disillusionment, I never had the illusion from earliest memories of red faced blustering bearded alcoholic men and the fear they induced that I have, that men could be assumed to be generally good.
Learning that men I was frightened of, men I despised, men that I was both frightened of and despised were capable of heinous things only made sense of the fear I felt unbidden. That the scary-red-faced-bearded men that instilled fear in me to my knowledge never did anything heinous possibly disillusioned me of any sense I was a good judge of character.
What I would point out here, as the basis of the 6 underground fallacy, is that moral optimisation may be admirable but fundamentally unmanageable.
The Silky sifaka is a type of Madagascan lemur that is critically endangered with an estimated fewer than 1,000 left in the wild. Prior to 3 minutes ago, I was unaware of the silky sifaka's existence, but now that you and I know the 6 underground fallacy demands we care.
And this caring can't happen in isolation, because we also think we know that 60% of women by age 15 have experienced sexual harassment.
You and I would agree both the prevalence with which women receive unwanted sexual attention and the fact that we are undergoing a mass extinction event is bad. But the 6 underground fallacy I assert says that it is wrong to presume moral failing when somebody doesn't care, or doesn't seem to care, or doesn't care as much as you do.
The 6 underground fallacy I feel generates the satirical perfection of Patrick Bateman's "Sri Lanka" speech in American Psycho's film adaptation, where we get demonstrated understanding of world problems of the 1980s without any caring, even Christian Bale's performance captures that Bateman himself is not interested in what he is saying, as a psychopath Bateman is likely incapable of caring, but framing the world as knowledge = obligation rather than knowledge = overwhelm and existential angst, is I would suggest, psychotic.
Not Dunning Kruger
If two people disagree, Occams razor I think would say the simplest explanation is that both parties have different information. Next to that, we go up in simple explanations to one party has considered more information than the other party, as the origin of the dispute.
Invoking theology is a useful pull for this point from the big data set of arguments that have been going on since long before Christianity. Maybe longer than history, we don't know.
I say it is useful because it can give us a bit of a hierarchy in the above example of the second-fold 6 underground fallacy:
1. tohm doesn't care about Nathan and Chris' same sex attraction therefore tohm must not understand what is "bad" about same sex attraction.
2. The fallacy has already been committed, because tohm does vaguely understand that some line in Leveticus claims man on man action is a sin.
3. But the committer of the fallacy hasn't considered why scripture should be regarded as an authority on anything beyond what the scripture says.
And we could keep going, but frankly, my knowing about the historiography of the bible's authorship and composition is in my view a biproduct of living in a world where people still take it seriously albeit in an unserious/unscholarly way. My feeling is there are sufficient arguments to be understood to be highly sceptical of any revealed theism, long before you need to open the cover of any holy book. (things not worth doing are not worth doing well).
But to a degree, this can apply to numerous applications of the 6 underground fallacy where someone thinks others should care because of a deficit of understanding.
Consider a child who needs to impress upon their parents that they had a bad dream. The child may be confronted by their parents lack of concern over the possibility of monsters in the closet or whatever. The child hasn't considered that the parents have a life time of observational data to know that the supernatural, pretty much doesn't exist, that they maintain a household for the child to live in by attending jobs that have brutal hours compared to the child's, along with a bunch of domestic labour that eats into their leisure time such that the parents don't care about the details of the child's bad dream and their perceived mortal dangers, only getting back to sleep or having some time in which to be adults and not parents.
They (the parents) are likely far more concerned by the valuation and division of domestic labour between them, than the possibility that their child's dream portends an actual attack by a supernatural monster that manifests either in the built in robes or under the bed with the condition of darkness.
The parents actually "don't care" by the child's perception of their parents lack of distress and poor performative reassurance at 3am on a week night, because they better understand the situation than the child is capable of doing.
As such, I guess this post is imploring you reader to understand that "caring" is a conclusion leapt to, by underplaying how difficult it is to actually attain knowledge - which is a justified true belief, adjudicated by predictive power.
What that last sentence means via example is: You know you have $20 when you can pay for something worth $20 - having $20 predicts the transaction, justifying your belief in having $20 as true. (Quite often, I forget about some direct debit payment, resulting in my card being declined. Sometimes I suspected my balance was low, other times I had an unjustified false belief, and didn't know I didn't have the money.)
TA Adult vs Parent/Child Ego states
Long forgotten by the passage of time for most people, but in the year 2000 Bill Clinton's presidential term came to an end and his VP Al Gore was the Democratic parties candidate to contest the 2000 election against upset candidate George W Bush son of Clinton's 1-term predecessor George HW Bush.
The election was close, dead close, and there were shenanigans I am not confident I can relate with any accuracy that made the election come down to Florida as decisive. It was called prematurely for Bush on a TV network, and others repeated the projection like blind mules hoping not to get scooped. Gore made a concession speech, but then someone suggested Florida might all be premature he unprecedentedly took-backsied his concession.
A recount ensued and eventually the US Supreme Court ruled on it in a split decision and one of the opinions said:
On December 9, the U.S. Supreme Court suspended the manual recount, in progress for only several hours, on the grounds that irreparable harm could befall Bush, according to a concurring opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia.
I remember this because Michael Moore who use to be popular, wrote in a book somewhere his interpretation of what Scalia had said which was "the recount should be stopped because if it turned out that Bush was not president, this would hurt his chances of being president."
SCOTUS is now well and truly stacked, and as a result, lacks legitimacy as an institution, I would interpret Scalia's opinion more charitably as "the recount could cause irreperable harm by giving credence to the idea that US elections were not free and fair and that the country was stolen." However, it doesn't make much sense to me, and Scalia may have intended this and was simply wrong, as a recount could only serve to make clear who was president, so in effect Moore's interpretation holds, and regarding the 2020 election, SCOTUS in the spirit of Scalia could have cited the irreparable harm the could befall Biden to compell Trump to stop all the stop the steal bullshit and concede that a President that was always unpopular as an incumbent may plausibly have just lost an election via that unpopularity.
This is all to say that my lived experience of the 6 underground fallacy is in parent-child ego transaction, terminology from the transactional analysis (TA) theory of psychology. Scalia under Moore's interpretation was parentally saying "Give baby Bush an icecream because he'll go waah-waah" and may as well have been saying "Give the Republicans a president or else they'll go waah-waah" and the 6 underground fallacy is generally employed to imply a party is responsible for the emotional state of a third party.
The detail of whether the invoker of a 6 underground fallacy is coming from parent or child ego state is irrelevant to me. I can imagine both, the danger of the 6 underground fallacy is its potential to have the recipient respond from a parent or child ego state.
Clapping back, for example is a fairly childish response, as is doubling down. Alternately conceding the fallacious conclusion that caring needs must follow understanding, is a very paternalistic response. TA games often involve movements not just between parent and child ego states, but roles of victim, abuser and rescuer.
My favorite feature of TA though, is the simple heuristic by which virtually all games can be defeated (more so than 'won') and that rule is: whoever adopts an adult ego state first, defeats the game.
Probably in its essential form, the 6 underground fallacy plays out in the following way:
- Parent to Child: I told you that upsets me, so why did you do it?
- Adult: I understand that it upsets you, but I won't take responsibility for your emotional state. I'll respect how you choose to handle your emotions, but I'll make my own choices.
From what I've written in this post, some people may feel anxious that what I'm advocating for is complete unaccountability for behaviour. I am not, which is why sadly, any discussion of fallacies practicly obliges the invocation of the fallacy fallacy.
If an argument is fallacious, all it means is that a reasonable person cannot accept the conclusion. Matt Dillahunty, professional magician and atheist debater uses a gumball analogy that I like.
If there's a glass jar filled with gumballs (or jellybeans, or m&ms or whatever) and you assert that the number of gumballs is even, and I say "I don't believe you" and then you assert that I must then believe that the number of gumballs is odd, I respond "I don't believe that either."
There is plenty of caring that follows quite directly from understanding - if you tell me the kitchen is on fire, I will care and rush to assist. If you tell me that humans exploit insect labour for taste based pleasure, my evaluation of the care factor is wholly different.
Where I struggle the most, is with the autonomy I extend to other people in making decisions such as whether to avoid or confront concepts really, that emotionally they struggle with.
I personally believe that "Confrontation over time can make things better, avoidance, makes things worse."
I have a young relative who has irrational fears (phobias) of insects. They are a child, so to me it is more appropriate to actually deny them agency where I wouldn't an adult stranger, and test the limits to which they can confront these debilitating phobias. At the moment, they are scared of pretty much all insects including bugs that are in almost all cases, harmless, we don't have cockroaches that can get in ears and break eardrums or centipedes or the bombardier beetle (which I'm not even sure is dangerous to humans). It also includes all spiders, even harmless ones like the daddy-longlegs and relatively harmless ones like the huntsman.
To allow a child to persist into adolescence with such phobias seems far more uncaring than attempting to confront those phobias through respectful confrontation, which can be as simple as role modelling calm.
Moving away from children, if someone chooses to avoid rather than confront their triggers, it is hard for me to respect that behaviour, but intellectually at least, I respect the right to do so. I do not feel it is my job to force confrontations.
Where I struggle most is that society simply can't function by even aspiring to be triggerless. For one, emotional states can be a zero sum game, where the request isn't "don't upset me" but functionally "you be upset so I don't have to be" and for two; greater society needs to be insensitive. In parenting terms this is expressed as "prepare the child for the road not the road for the child" or "you can pave the world or you can make sandals" for adults.
Public spaces, third spaces, social gatherings need to be accessible and free.
I like Dr Grande's usage of a car alarm as an analogy - A car alarm that is too sensitive is as useless as a car alarm that is too insensitive. It needs to be calibrated.
In this sense, both sensitivity and insensitivity need to be respected. The masters of this calibration act are canis familiaris who (human inflicted trauma aside) can discern intent. They know when their tale is stepped on by accident, and when a human kicks them out of malice, and those two things rarely happen in conjunction with eye-contact. They can discern intent from the toes to the knees.
It seems to me, that people likely have a disadvantage on account of our greater cognitive abilities, our larger vocabularies, that we can confuse ourselves through the stories we tell ourselves and frankly, while I know my emotional intelligence/competence is low, I am not impressed in general by others and suspect that many are disadvantaged by stories and stereotypes that suggest they have some natural advantage in emotional intelligence and empathizing.
Perhaps a simple example is dinner parties, I understand that some people have weird dietary preferances based often, on the podcasts they listen to, and I also understand that some people have anaphalactic allergic reactions and religious/philosophical beliefs that restrict their diets. I do not care about the former preferences that I do understand, and I do care about the latter restrictions that I also understand.
Furthermore, sorry vegans, but I was once at a party where I quipped "No meat, that's offensive" and my friend pointed out "some people find displaying animal carcasses offensive" when my quip didn't land with that crowd. I better understand the perspective of some vegans and vegetarians, and my quip remains a quip because I personally am not offended by an absence of meat and as such I remain uncaring as to whether animal carcasses are displayed for consumption or not. I do not care if some people have arrived at a world view where they find the displaying of animal carcasses offensive.
Fundamentally, I feel as I've described it the 6 underground fallacy is a sound one. We cannot reasonably arrive at a conclusion that understanding obliges one to care. Furthermore, I dislike the 6 underground fallacy because it is either totalitarian or condescending or both simultaneously.
Probably the only loose end, which I shall leave loose until I can be persuaded to care, is that the 6 underground fallacy did a lot of damage over the last decade. I think it did, but you are free to both not understand my thoughts on that, nor care.
